La perception est-elle intentionnelle ?

In this article, Claude Romano challenges one of the more widespread assumptions in the phenomenological school, and especially in Husserl and his disciples, that of the intentional character of perception. Not denying that perception could have some aspects that are intentional (it is linked to attention, it encapsulates sometimes beliefs that are intentional attitudes), he claims that perception is not an intentional relation to the world. Indeed, intentionality is a basic feature of mind that remains connected to a form of representationalism. Now, as Heidegger has suggested with his concept of In-der-Welt-sein, and as Erwin Straus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty also emphasized, perception is rather an innerently bodily relation to world itself, that is, to the world as it exists independently of the mind and beyond all representations. Only such an approach can do justice to our ordinary and philosophical intuitions about the perceived world, and lead us to a genuine variety of phenomenological realism.